When it comes to promoting and networking the first thing most DJs immediately jump to is social media, “get a Facebook page and create an event,” or “get a Soundcloud account and send out your mixes“. While social media has it’s place in promotion, DJs are missing out on a platform that has more users than Facebook and Twitter combined, plus more engaged users. Is this a brand new platform that just launched? Is it Facesnaptagram? Nope, it’s good ol’ fashion email.
Today, David King, founder of Receiver, is going to share how to collect fans emails and why it’s superior to social media for reaching and engaging with your fans.
Marketing 101: Inbound Marketing vs. Outbound Marketing
Whether DJs realize it or not, they are inbound marketers. Outbound marketers leverage tools like billboards and TV spots to get their message across. To succeed in the 90’s you needed a ton of outbound channels to grow your audience. Traditional mediums such as radio, TV and print used to have huge barriers to entry. That has all changed.
Inbound marketers draw in potential customers and fans with content they want to engage with. Content – new music on Soundcloud, gig/tour photos on Instagram, Facebook memes – are all responsible for attracting your audience. Inbound marketing has transformed the way that most industries grow their customer base and it has changed the way artists, producers, and DJs build their following. Today, you just need great music and the ability to effectively reach and communicate with an audience.
Social Media Lets You Reach New Fans – Use Email To Keep Fans Coming Back
Facebook, Soundcloud, Twitter, Blogs etc. are all great ways to reach new fans for the first time. They’ve lowered the barrier to entry when it comes to discovery, but, as I’m sure a lot of you are finding, they aren’t the best place to maintain and nurture your relationship with those fans. A lot of the artists I’ve worked with over the last 5 years are frustrated because they’ve invested into growing a Facebook following but can’t reach the people who matter most to their business – their fans.
While social platforms offer you the ability to reach 1B+ people, at some point, your primary concern as an artist becomes reaching the 1k, 10k, or 100k true fans that have opted in to receive your updates. This is where email – and to a certain extent mobile numbers (but we can talk about that another time) provide a massive advantage over social followers.
Email Is Easier And More Effective Than Alternatives
Typically email marketing gets 5X the visibility when compared to Facebook (Source: DIY Themes). Emails are also 6X (Source: Campaign Monitor) more likely to get a click through (following a link) compared with Twitter. With Soundcloud your followers only receive updates about new music in their feed.
More importantly, savvy digital marketers consider social media to be almost 5x more difficult to do properly and 10% less effective than email (Source: Marketing Charts). Social and streaming services are massively important for reaching new listeners but when you want to really reach your fans, getting their email can be the most effective way to reach them in the long run.
With an email address, artists have a direct line of contact to their fans. Compare this to a Facebook Page where there’s no way to message all fans directly and a posts organic reach is extremely limited. It is possible to increase the reach of posts on a Facebook page but it comes at a price.
How Do I Get Emails?
Most people won’t just hand out their email, they need something valuable in exchange. To get fans to give you their email – give them something they want such as a track or mix download. With Receiver, artists can quickly set up an account, upload songs or mixes, and offer them as free downloads in exchange for an email address. One of the artists using Receiver (check out Viceroy’s page) is passively collecting 30 emails per day by driving people to his website and offering content in exchange for shares or emails.
We’ve seen artists get approximately 1 email for every 40 plays of a track on Soundcloud. Each of those emails is someone those artists can more effectively reach. The Receiver embeddable player also lets you collect emails on other websites, so DJs can share their music across popular blogs and still collect emails. Other tools DJ can use to collect emails include Topspin or Bandcamp.
Getting Emails At Shows
For DJs and performers with residencies, collecting emails is a great way to keep attendees updated on upcoming shows and promotions. DJ TechTools own Dan White runs a monthly residency, “ZERO F*CKS”, at Public Works in San Francisco. When attendees arrive, the door person greets them and offers the chance to sign up for the event newsletter, “If you want to hear more about ZERO F*CKS events in the future, sign up here! There’s no spam, we promise”. It’s short, simple and to the point. An email is sent out a week before every gig promoting the next event, t-shirts, and secret after hours parties.
Another tactic to use at live shows is to request that fans send you their photos. Not only are fan photos great content, but this increases your fan engagement. Sometimes the most effective approaches are remarkably simple.
Respect The Inbox
Digital marketing has levelled the playing field. It’s cheaper than ever to reach potential fans but building a relationship with them is still hard. Social media lets you easily make a first impression. Even the most sophisticated marketers believe social media is one of the hardest places to reach customers. Growing an email list doesn’t have to be hard and using the right tools will allow you to do it passively.
After you grow your list of subscribers, use it properly. Don’t spam and send fans what they want: exclusive previews of tracks, discounts on tickets and in essence, the feeling that they are part of their favorite artist’s tribe.
David King is the founder of Receiver, a service that lets DJs and producers build a mobile ready website with tools designed to reach their fans.
Are you collecting emails? How do you reach your fans?
Let us know in the comments below!
This was one of the most simple but extremely important tips I learned from the ill.Gates workshops.. Those e-mails are valuable, especially exported from bandcamp with their location, etc
Here’s the ugly truth about e-mail: no one likes having any information pushed at them even when they sign up for it. Sure, it’s better that people opt in, by signing up for e-mail blasts, but no one wants to have to sift through countless e-mails to figure out what to do on the weekend, and how do they even find you in the first place to get on your e-mail feed?
Ultimately you want something which helps your customers figure out what to do, even when you’re not there to give it to them.
E-mail isn’t the secret, novel way to reach your customers, it’s a channel that is just as saturated as radio, TV, YouTube, Facebook, billboards, and other print media. Every sales channel screams “Look at me!” which burns that channel out a little bit each time it’s pushed too hard (like cocaine does to the cocaine uptake receptors in the brain). The difference between these two being (another classic sales method) “no one wants to be sold something, they want someone to help them buy what they want.”
So what’s better than e-mail? The “connected friend”, the “tastemaker” for what you want to do, but only for as long as their tastes coincide with yours, and only while they’re trustworthy. We used to have magazines and radio stations to help us figure out where to go if we were into a style of music, and you typically had someone at a record store who could turn you onto radio stations, bands, and magazines. This is greatly needed as an app or music environment. now. Tastemakers helping other people find what they want to do.
While someone can track you as an artist, that person isn’t well serviced by your e-mail proudly proclaiming yoru’re in a city 3,000 miles away. They would be serviced better if they were told you’re out of town, but this other, similar, artist IS in town and playing.
I like to think of this as community building, instead of owning customers, you help them to love you even more, and nothing helps a customer buy more than feeling like they belong somewhere.
You’ve given me a lot to think about, thanks!
Definitely agree – artists who share music beyond their own and become trusted sources.
Email isn’t the magic bullet, but nothing is. But as a channel it gives you the best insight into who cares about your message and consistently engages with it.
I still think e-mail is more or less as dead. There’s just too much “too muchness”, and filtering out the noise is something which is highly valued.
Broadcasting as hard as you can, while it does reach a lot of people, doesn’t mean you compel them to see you (ask any local band what their flyer-to-attendee ratio is and you’ll see it’s quite high… or rather, it takes a LOT of advertising to get even a small turn out).
The best form of outside sales is word of mouth. This also ensures that if someone who is invested in whatever the thing is wants to keep that thing “high quality”, they will be discrete about who they invite to share the experience… unless they’re paid per head.
We know how to reach out to people, we just don’t have the sophistication enough to reach out responsibly.
Show that you care about more than the money.
agreed~
A companion article on how to formulate an email newsletter would be awesome.
Definitely – we are currently testing a number of different types of emails to see what works.
Awesome! I ask because I’ve recently been asked to think about possibly managing a weekly email newsletter, an article like that would be a great help. Frankly, DJTTs weekly newsletter is a main point of reference, always look forward to it.
MAILCHIMP!!! Its perfect… I use it with wordpress and have it linked to my contact form plugins too. I can send proper branded emails 😀 so easy to setup.
lol I should write soemthing up in the forums 🙂